Parents often report that their child has a difficult time sharing experiences. Retelling a story requires an individual to apply complex linguistic rules, recall information, and formulate in real time. A break down can happen at various different levels. Next time your child begins to retell a story or experience, listen for the following linguistic elements.
- Sequencing Ability
- Is the story order appropriate or jumbled up?
- Working Memory
- Is the child using enough details?
- Are these details relevant to the story?
- Grammar
- Does the sentence structure contains errors such as run-on sentences or incorrectly produced words
- Is the child using temporal markers and cohesive ties to connect the story together
- Is the child’s sentence complexity adequate for their age?
- Vocabulary
- Is it immature or age-level?
- Does the child have word retrieval issues?
- Pragmatics
- Is there story cohesion and coherence?
- Is there adequate use of pronouns to identify characters?
- Perspective Taking
- Does the child have appropriate insight into character’s feelings, beliefs, and thoughts?